Travel Photography Tips

10 Tips For Taking Better Travel Photos With Your Phone

Venturing into an unfamiliar place can be a frightening and intimidating experience, even for a seasoned traveller. For some, that's where the artistic magic happens.

"I find working in intense and overwhelming situations to be one of the most rewarding experiences," says David Noyes, travel photographer and winner of the North American Travel Journalists Association (NATJA) Gold Prize Winner for Best Travel Book of 2015. "A camera can very easily be a barrier to people or something for a tourist to hide behind, but it can also be a tool to enrich travel experiences and a bridge to lost cultures. Use the camera to truly engage the environment that you’re in, and for the opportunity to meet people."

While you can get on a plane and physically travel thousands of miles in a matter of hours and end up in some remote corners of the world, the hard part as a tourist is "familiarising yourself with transportation options, culture, local customs, language," says Noyes.

Restricted to the challenge of the itinerary and confined by transportation limitations, tourist photographers are, most of the time, working off an itinerary, meaning being at this place, at this time, for this long, and likely never returning to the same spot. That doesn’t mean that you can’t produce great travel photography while touristing, says Noyes; it just means you need to work faster and find authenticity along the edges of your adventures. The challenge is to think differently and make the most of the thirty minutes, hour, or two hours before moving on to the next location. Here's how.

Learn The Rule Of Thirds

David Noyes

Simply stated, the Rule of Thirds is a classic compositional guideline suggesting that if you divide an image into three equal parts, both up and-down and side-to-side, elements placed near or at the intersection of those lines will have the most impact. The rule forces the main subject of the image off-centre, helping to create a more interesting composition. This technique works well with almost any subject, but you don’t need to be obsessive about the rule, just start taking the time to move the main object of your photograph slightly off centre.

Use The Light

David Noyes

The old rule of thumb for successful photography is to keep the sun at your back and avoid harsh shadows. It is a rule of thumb because following it will produce well-exposed, evenly lit photographs. It is also the most predictable and least creative use of light. Since all the shadows of a front-lit scene are falling behind the subject and away from the camera, it is considered a “flat” light that lacks any sense of depth. Strong shadows and texture created by a sidelight are usually more interesting and dramatic. Since the light is scraping across the object, it creates large and small shadows that exaggerate surface textures, define depth, and enhance the tactile qualities of a subject.

Get The Cliché Out Of The Way

David Noyes

There is nothing wrong with taking your own version of an iconic photograph from a famous viewpoint. So get the clichéd photograph out of the way and off your mind as soon as possible. You won’t feel right until you've found and captured the view just the way you have pictured it in your mind. Then go to work with the time you have left to tell a different story. After taking the typical shots of over-photographed places, find a different point of view or an interesting composition. When the crowd goes right… go left. You might surprise yourself with a totally unique look. But be sure to circle back to the spot of the iconic shot just before you leave. The light might have changed and can provide you with one last chance at a brilliant photographic souvenir.

Go Where People Gather

David Noyes

Just about everyone has tried to take pictures of people they meet on their journeys. Often they are shot quickly, candidly, and from a distance to avoid the uncomfortable feelings we get when approaching someone we don’t know. It is natural to be uncomfortable photographing strangers in a strange land, but shooting portraits can be the most fulfilling and rewarding part of the tourist experience.

There is nothing more difficult for a tourist than capturing an authentic human connection in a photograph. It takes courage to raise your camera in a crowded street market or approach a stranger in an unfamiliar country to ask for a picture. If you do, for one brief moment in time you are connected with another human being and sharing an experience that transcends cultural differences. To take great photographs of people, you need to go where people gather.

Beware of the Cute Kid with a Baby Lamb

David Noyes

The natural curiosity of children makes them a great way to start shooting and finding your comfort zone in an unfamiliar place. But one reality that travellers must always be aware of is that in many places around the world, when tourists are spotted, beggars, hawkers and scammers seem to show up quickly and in many forms. The adorable little girl dressed in traditional clothing wandering the streets of Cuzco in Peru carrying a baby lamb is working! She is so cute it is hard not to take her picture, but she will expect to be paid, often aggressively, and her mother is probably watching nearby.

Most importantly, if young children become an important source of income for a family through begging from tourists or being paid for pictures, it is unlikely that they will ever attend school, condemning them to a life of poverty. No doubt her family could use the money, but in this instance both the tourist and the local community are being exploited.

Squat Down and Look Again

David Noyes

Novice photographers tend to photograph the world from eye-level, creating predictable images. Sometimes, squatting down will help you avoid a distraction in the background or getting up higher will let you crop out unwanted elements. Those are practical reasons to find a different camera angle, but finding a unique way to photograph a scene can dramatically affect a viewer’s emotional reaction to an image. An unfamiliar or unexpected way of looking at something confuses our visual cues and can create surprise, interest and curiosity in your photographs.

Low angles exaggerate height and perspective, while looking down on a subject can provide context to complicated scenes. This may require you to lie on the ground, crawl, or climb to find a different angle of view, but the effort will result in a new look at a familiar scene. When you are stuck for an idea, squat down and look again.

Take a Blind Shot

David Noyes

One way to play with new angles is to raise the camera over your head, place it on the ground and point it up, or shoot from your hip as you walk. The advent of auto focus has allowed photographers to get a sharp image without having to look through the viewfinder. Creating blind shots like these does require a good understanding of framing and being able to envision what the camera might be pointing at. A little luck also helps. The blind shot can also give your photographs a voyeuristic feel or visual tension when made by holding the camera at your side or waist while walking down a crowded street or through a market. The resulting compositions are often more edgy and creative than if you would have selected the framing by looking through the viewfinder.

Embrace White

David Noyes

Unfortunately, some of the world’s great things to see and places to visit also have overcast and stormy days. Some days you might just be unlucky. But that doesn’t mean you put down your camera and stop shooting. When those days happen during your tour, you need to think about the images you can make, not the ones you had hoped to make. Romantic, muted tones and soft light can provide pleasant modelling to facial features in your portraits. Wet streets and umbrellas can add drama to everyday city scenes. Threatening skies can generate feelings of excitement and anticipation to a seascape. Monochromatic landscapes can have dramatic effects. Dense fog can elicit a feeling of foreboding as objects fade layer after layer into the misty distance. If you know what to look for and how to use it, an overcast day can be a great friend to travel photographers.

Control Your Focus

Unlike a camera, the human eye can’t focus on both close and distant objects at the same time. A reason that novice photographers don’t often notice the strange pole coming out of the subjects’ ear before making a portrait is because they quite literally didn’t see it in the background. When everything in the picture is equally sharp, the viewer relies on elements of design and composition to navigate the image. If some parts of the image are sharp and others not, the eye is drawn to the sharpest parts of the image. Controlling focus is one of the most important skills for any photographer.

As photographers, we control our depth of field to reduce visual clutter and let viewers know what is important in the image. Generally, the larger the lens aperture (smaller f-number), the more shallow the depth of field, and the smaller the aperture (larger f-number), the greater the depth of field. If you leave the choice of f-stop to the automatic settings of your camera, you will have surrendered control of one of the most significant aspects of photography.

Get Engaged

To make your photographs more interesting, more powerful, and more artistic, you are forced to engage, to see what others might overlook, and to notice the small things that capture the character of a place. If you use your camera with the intention of exploring a destination, culture, environment, or landscape, it will change your travel experience, change the way you interact with people, and ultimately change the quality and meaning of your images.

Taking pictures while travelling is very different than travelling as a photographer. Being truly engaged with the people and places you visit is a choice and the difference between creating snapshots and creating moving, interesting and powerful travel images. You are no longer simply sightseeing or passively looking, you are actively engaged in creating your own interactive travel memories, potentially more valuable than any of the resulting images.